sides, they're
nothing but lines, anyway. I shouldn't draw a house so."

Corona laughed with some embarrassment and no effort at enlightenment.
She was not used to finding herself and Susy so nearly on the same
intellectual level as in this instance. She merely asked: "How should
you draw it?"

"Why, so," said Susy, after some severe thought. So she took her little
blunt lead pencil, that the baby had chewed, and drew her plan as
follows:

[Illustration: SUSY'S PLAN]

Corona made no comment upon this plan, except to ask Susy if that were
the way to spell L; and then to look in the dictionary, and find that it
was not spelled at all. Tom came in, and asked to see what they were
doing.

"I'm helping Corona," said Susy, with much complacency. "These
architects' things don't look any more like houses than they do like the
first proposition in Euclid; and the poor girl is puzzled."

"_I'll_ help you to-morrow, Co," said Tom, who was in too much of a
hurry to glance at his wife's plan. But to-morrow Tom went into town by
the early train, and when Corona emerged from her "North American
Homes," with wild eye and knotted brow, at 5 o'clock p.m., she found
Susy crying over a telegram which ran:

Called to California immediately. Those lost cargoes A No. 1 hides
turned up. Can't get home to say good-by. Send overcoat and
flannels by Simpson on midnight express. Gone four weeks. Love to
all.

TOM.

This unexpected event threw Corona entirely upon her own resources; and,
after a few days more of patient research, she put on her hat, and stole
away at dusk to a builder she knew of down-town--a nice, fatherly man
who had once built a piazza for Tom and had just been elected
superintendent of the Sunday-school. These combined facts gave Corona
confidence to trust her case to his hands. She carried a neat little
plan of her own with her, the result of several days' hard labor. Susy's
plan she had taken the precaution to cut into paper dolls for the baby.
Corona found the good man at home, and in her most business-like manner
presented her points.

"Got any plan in yer own head?" asked the builder, hearing her in
silence. In silence Corona laid before him the paper which had cost her
so much toil.

It was headed in her clear black hand:

PLAN
FOR A SMALL BUT HAPPY
HOME

This was

[Illustration: CORONA'S PLAN]

"Well," said the builder, after a silence,--"well, I've seen worse."

"